Roaming the library, outside of academia

Tag Archives: Philosophy of Science

Project Wolf is currently mostly on hold while I gather appropriate resources and information. You can find the rest of my posts on Project Wolf through the Project Wolf category. This post is a summation of some of my recent thoughts on the status of experiment, which I will hope to substantiate and research further.

One of the primary aims of Project Wolf has been to illuminate the shift of science to controlled experiment which happened following the renaissance. New technology enabled a different sort of engagement with the pursuit of knowledge, and a change in the way that we think about knowledge acquisition.

I have been thinking more recently about ways in which technology in modernity has enabled us to open up new vehicles for the acquisition of scientific knowledge, and it struck me that with computing power we do indeed have a new mode of experimentation which is arguably different from traditional experimentation: modelling.

Previously my thoughts had been very focussed on a clear articulation between a exegetical, descriptive and observational scientific mode of inquiry, in contrast to a model of inquiry based on experimentation and the ability to create controlled conditions under which it is possible to replicate events. I am currently working from the point of view that modelling does not quite fall into either category.

I am currently positioning my taxonomy of inquiry as follows:

Observational Science: science which stems from the observation and description of events or things, usually captured in a literary manner. Examples might include the works of Darwin, Freud and others.

Experiment: science which takes a theorem and tests it under controlled conditions where outcomes are measured against a neutral baseline, with the aim of clarifying a general law.

Modelling: science which starts with an assumed general law and builds a larger picture on those assumptions, from which predictions of varying accuracy can be made.

If I am to explore, through Project Wolf, the rise of experiment through development of better technology, it would be sensible to consider my next step to explore if something similar is happening with modelling through the increasing capacity of computer technology.

If you have come across work on the philosophical status of scientific modelling, please do leave a comment.

In this post I will be exploring the rise of scientific instruments and elaborating on some of the ways in which they made empirical science possible. In particular, I will be recounting some of the history of the thermometer.

The 17 century marked the invention of six new scientific instruments: the microscope, the telescope, the thermometer, the barometer, the air-pump and the pendulum clock. These instruments not only gave a means for phenomena to be measured in a way that could be standardised, but also enabled experiments to be carried out in environments which were both controlled and possible to recreate.

One could argue that the invention of these very basic instruments allowed experiments in general to be a viable route towards scientific knowledge. Whewall, when talking about the differentiation between facts and ideas, states the following:

“The impressions of sense, unconnected by some rational and speculative principle, can only end in a practical acquaintance with individual objects; the operations of the rational faculties, on the other hand, if allowed to go on without a constant reference to external things, can lead only to empty abstraction and barren ingenuity”

Before the rise of scientific instruments, we only had knowledge of the world around us by that which we could ascertain by our basic senses. We could easily speculate and theorise about the nature of things, as we see in the writings of ancient philosophers such as Democritus and Lucretius, but we would have no way of being able to solidify the claims we were making. We might have a theory that the apple in front of us was made from tiny indivisible units, but until the invention of powerful microscopes, all we know about the apple is its shape, colour and flavour. As our instruments and methods get better, we are able to refine and reapply our theories.

The story of the thermometer is one which particularly interests me. Very early thermometers and thermoscopes are described from around 1 CE, by writers such as Hero of Alexandria and Philo of Byzantium. These very early thermometers relied entirely on the expansion of air. The thermometer would comprise of a tube which was open at one and and closed by a bulb at the other. This tube was suspended in water, and as the temperature rose the air in the bulb would expand and move the water in the tube. At the time, these instruments were used for pneumatics.

As with much ancient knowledge, thermoscopes were largely forgotten about during the dark ages. It was Gallileo who re-invented the thermometer in around 1592 CE. His thermometer relied on very similar mechanics to the original ones. By around 1612 the first clinical thermometer had been made by Sanctorius. The patient put the top air-filled bulb of the glass tube in their mouth, and the heat then affected the water in the lower end of the tube.

Air thermometers had one big problem – they were affected severely by atmospheric pressure. In 1632 a French doctor, Jean Ray, first suggested creating a liquid thermometer, and between 1641 and 1654 the water used in thermometers was being replaced by alcohol. Some of these thermometers were so large that they needed to be made in a spiral shape to accommodate their length.

At this point, a debate was growing over the best way to standardise thermometers. Previously there had been no standard for marking the temperatures on thermometers and no consensus on how to unitise temperature. Boyle was one of the main instigators for fixing a scale, and suggested that all thermometers should share one fixed point on their scale, this being the freezing point of oil or aniseed. In 1665 Huygens suggested standardising the scale by the proportion between the capacity of the bulb of the thermometer and the bore of the tube, and that either the freezing point or the boiling point of water should be the one fixed point. There were a number of interesting suggestions for what would make a suitable fixed point during the late 1600s, including the melting point of butter.

At some point, the favoured liquid for thermometers became mercury, though it is not known exactly when this happened or exactly who was the first to make a mercury thermometer. In 1714, Farenheit adopted the mercury thermometer and included three fixed points on his scale: the temperature of a mixture of ice, pure water and salt was marked as 0°; the temperature of a mixture of ice and pure water was marked as 32°; the temperature of the human body was marked at 96°. Later, Farenheit added the boiling point of water as a fixed measure, at 212°. Farenheit also added a barometer to accompany his thermometer, as this allowed the user to account for the atmospheric pressure when they were taking a measurement.

The 100 degree scale was invented in 1742 by Celsius. He took his scale as being the melting point of ice as 100° and the boiling point of water as 0°. The term “centigrade” comes from Christin of Lyons.

In this potted history of the thermometer, we can see the shape of the struggles faced by early scientific instruments. Notably, we can see the importance of being able to standardise the scales that these instruments used, and being able to control and account for other factors which might affect our measurements. It took around 150 years of development to have thermometers with a consistent scale measured around a reliable number of fixed points – something that we take entirely for granted today.

This blog will be organised in to a number of research projects, each with a catchy codename. Updates may be sporadic and will depend on life and work. There may be several projects running concurrently. When I consider a project concluded, I will write a summary of the outcomes. The first post in each project will include an outline, and an indication of what will be researched over the course of the project. If you have any thoughts, leads, or relevant resources they are more than welcome regardless of the subject focus, as are general criticisms of the nature of the project itself.

My first project will be a summary and a continuation of the last research project I undertook during an MA in Literature and Philosophy. I had entered this MA course in 2010 somewhat too quickly in order to avoid the fee raise (which doubled at taught Master’s level), and realised early on that not only was this not really the right course for my interests, but also that the part-time work I was doing could not possibly support my household.

This project sprung from my interest in the development of science throughout history, and the representation of science in the literature at the time. This was to include, where possible, the ways in which results of scientific experiments are presented, as well as representations of science in fiction. I never entirely got around to examining scientific literature, and I think this will be left for another project. Ultimately, the crux for me was the transition between science being a naturalistic subject and science being something which operated in terms of quantification.

The précis for my original essay was as follows:

Over the course of this essay, we will be examining the evolution of science literature in relation to the content and standing of science and the philosophy of science. As scientific understanding develops, we will see this reflected in the manner that science is represented in its literature. From this, we will be able to draw some conclusions about the underlying epistemology when we are presented with a piece of science writing.

We will be extending our study over three very broad periods of time: Classical, Medieval, and Modern. The Classical period will denote the Greco-Roman era, the Medieval period will extend from the end of the Roman Era to around 15th Century, and the Modern period will be from the 16th century onward.

We will begin by firstly outlining what was considered to be scientific study at during the era, and we will examine some texts by key writers. Alongside this, we will also follow the historical development of a particular science and its associated writings in order to give a clear comparison of writings that were considered “natural philosophy” and not always strictly science. We will then consider these writings alongside those of philosophers who wrote on science at the time. To begin with, we will notice that there is a great overlap between scientists and philosophers, which eventually weakens as we travel into the modern era. We may draw some conclusions as to why this may be the case.

The ultimate goal of the essay will be to show a sudden shift in the way in which science is represented in literature at the beginning of the modern period, when conditions for observation and measurement were greatly improved. In some way, we hope to build upon or examine further the postulation made by Wolf (1938) that science shifted from an Aristotelian focus to a Pythagorean focus, and we will attempt to adapt that claim to reflect the written content of science. We also hope to be able to bring some of Naussbaum’s observations of the relationship between form and content into this dialogue, and we will find that many of the questions regarding whether literature is an appropriate vessel for philosophy will be applicable to science.

You can click here to see the power-point presentation I gave outlining my approach to the essay, which sadly remains unwritten. I hope that during this project I will slightly amend this state of affairs.

During my initial scoping of the project, I had established that the branch of science which seemed most consistently to be considered “science” as opposed to “natural philosophy” or even “philosophy” was actually biology. This revelation had come as a surprise to me, as I had by far expected mathematics to be more consistently considered science. I was also quite shocked at the extent to which medicine had remained in the realms of folklore, and the sheer length of time it took to draw scientific links between medicine and biology. For the purposes of further research, I am likely to continue plans of attack from a biological perspective.

Looking back at my notes, I am not entirely sure how Naussbaum is crammed in all of this, and suspect it may have been my tenuous attempt to tie this research back to the module (“Literature and Knowledge”, for reference). I do not wish to be dismissive of my past self, so I will intend to review whether or not Naussbaum is relevant later in this project. My initial outline was also overly concerned with Abraham Wolf, so I will also be hoping to find some other commentators on the topic in order to diversify my own understanding.